Several months ago I posted What to expect when you debate a feminist. Three of my key points were:
- Don’t expect an actual rational argument beyond their well rehearsed opening salvo and a few well worn slogans.
- They will try to shame you.
You wouldn’t make that argument if you had a bigger penis.
- Once they realize they can’t win the argument, they will try to scuttle the debate.
A feminist lost a debate
You may be wondering if there is a risk in outlining their playbook so openly. What if the feminists realize we are on to them and start doing things differently? What if they start using rational arguments instead of the same cheap tactics which they have used for 50 years? What then? But then you would be forgetting one of my other key points:
Their tactics never change.
As evidence, I present to you Exhibit A: Ferdinand’s DV Debate: David Futrelle fulminates; loses temper and debate
I admit I didn’t read the whole debate between Paul Elam and the male feminist who’s cups runneth over. He went there to trade study for study on the question of whether women really do commit domestic violence against men at similar levels as men do to women. His argument was that since he could point to more studies showing the orthodox feminist view, his perspective must be right. I stopped reading after a commenter to the debate jumped in the ring and knocked the feminist out with a link to the Jezebel post where feminists brag about all of the domestic violence they have committed against their boyfriends: Have You Ever Beat Up A Boyfriend? Cause, Uh, We Have
Stay classy feminists.
The feminist looked like he might come to just in time to avoid the count. He started mumbling incoherently that the link didn’t prove anything, and there weren’t that many women eagerly recounting tales of abusing their boyfriends. Besides, the women were probably lying and had really just been defending themselves. And none of the comments looked that bad to him anyway. Most of those guys probably eventually recovered with proper medical treatment.
Then a commenter on his own blog pointed out that there are multiple pages of comments on the post, and referenced examples of the women breaking into ex boyfriends homes and stabbing them, etc. Even the feminist was stunned. I pretty much stopped following the action at that point.
So I wasn’t surprised to learn that shortly thereafter he stopped backing up the feminist study dump truck and decided to find an excuse to end the debate and remove the record of it instead.
Right about now you may be thinking wait, the feminist forgot to say Paul has a small penis! Isn’t that a rule?
Yes, but the feminist debating Paul is actually a man with gender inappropriate cleavage issues; this would put him in a tough spot when it came to making the small penis argument.
Fortunately for him, one of the female feminist commenters on his site was willing to step in and handle this task herself. To the feminist blogger’s credit, he did point out that telling someone they have a small penis isn’t exactly an argument. At this point the female commenter clarified that she of course didn’t mean that feminist men had small penises. As Deansdale shares in his post This is what a feminist brain looks like:
Tec, talking about MRAs: “And fyi, I don’t get wet from little babies and their tiny baby penises.“
Manboobz: “Tec, thanks. (Except maybe for the baby penises bit; no need to sink to their level.)“
Tec: “And so David, so the tiny penis comment wasn’t meant for you, just the big babies who weren’t breastfed long enough and now whine about evil womynz.“
the debate shut down over another important difference: Manboobz looked at the intensity of DV, while Paul argued from an occurrence standpoint.
Both are valid but ultimately Manboobz (R.I.P.) backed out, refusing to acknowledge any significant contribution by women to DV. Complete herbdouche.
Paul, with the handy assistance of various MRAs, won this debate. Next round?
How about debating a top feminist blogger on what aspects of Political Correctness should be modified/eliminated? I could suggest at least 5 things they could tackle.
It seems to me that Futrelle also bailed on the asymmetry in the law. Under the US Violence Against Women Act, a whole lot of things are classified as “domestic violence” that are questionable at best; not giving her enough money, shouting, and so forth. So the stats are inflated. Plus in many states there are mandatory arrest laws, if a woman picks up the phone and dials emergency 911 all she has to say is that she’s “afraid”, and there will be a police car at the front door in a while, and the man in the house will be arrested. I don’t know if anyone even tries to collect data on false DV accusations, frankly, but Futrelle didn’t even acknowledge that issue as far as I can tell.
Whether this indicates a blind spot on his part, or deliberate mendaciousness I can’t say.But it is telling.
Hmm, just had a friend go through this recently and I can tell you that in Canada, that even a shove….EVEN IF YOU ARE DEFENDING YOURSELF FROM A WOMAN GETTING INTO YOUR PERSONAL SPACE is considered assault.
My friend, WL, is a bouncer where I work p/t, one of the few who will back up anyone in the occurrence of an altercation. He was knocked out and had someone kicking him in the head like it was a soccer ball at the time.
Why does he do it, even after this episode? The money helps him with the bills as he is the sole breadwinner, NOT because he wants to still do it. After that situation, he is VERY anxious about people getting into his personal space.
Didn’t help him when his ‘wife’ got angry and got right into his face and was shouting at him.
He didn’t lay a hand on her, he refuses to sink to that level, and he was arrested and charged with assault. Even the Justice of the Peace who was presiding over his case stated that he sees far too many men in this situation due to the vagueness of the law.
Consider it folks, as for Manboobz, I read the debate, Paul Elam remained objective about the whole thing while Futrelle was backpedaling pretty from the jump. Feelings have little to nothing to do with debates, cold, hard facts do.
This is where Feminists drop the ball…repeatedly.
So you didn’t actually read the whole thing (and from your summary of what you think my argument was, you didn’t understand what you did read), but you feel confident that Paul won. Brilliant.
You should at least read this part of the debate:
http://manboobz.blogspot.com/2010/10/paul-elams-big-mistake-on-domestic.html
I’ll be curious to see if you actually allow my comment to be posted here.
Also, the part about the Jezebel article is pure fiction on your part. I didn’t actually say any of the stuff you say I said:
>He started mumbling incoherently that the link didn’t prove anything, and there weren’t that many women eagerly recounting tales of abusing their boyfriends.
I didn’t say that.
>Besides, the women were probably lying and had really just been defending themselves.
I didn’t say that.
>And none of the comments looked that bad to him anyway. Most of those guys probably eventually recovered with proper medical treatment.
I didn’t say that.
Anyone who wants to can look at the discussion you’re referring to and see what I DID in fact say.
http://manboobz.blogspot.com/2010/10/my-first-post-in-domestic-violence.html
[D: You mean you weren’t really unconscious in a boxing ring knocked out by a commenter, and came to just before the final count?]
Futrelle, shouldn’t you be telling Dalrock how he’s clearly suffering from a small penis? After all, that’s the sort of deep thinking your fangirl Tec likes to throw around…
No, he’s right. He didn’t say any of that. He didn’t say anything at all in fact. besides calling it “obnoxious.”
We, apparently, live in a world where women can brandish knives and attempt to run over their boyfriends with a car (another charming girl from that thread) and the reaction is the same as if someone had farted in public.
I am hardly surprised that Feminist Manboob would show up here trying to toss in a response he made after he slinked out of the debate with his tail between his legs.
He actually thinks he scored on that last round, when all he actually did was offer up a single study, conducted by feminist ideologues, that pointed to more frequency in men’s perpetration than women’s.
Newsflash, David. If you had maintained your integrity and finished the debate, you would not be running around to individual forums to try to get your last word in.
You made your choice, it cost you all credibility (assuming you had any) and now no one gives a shit. It’s too bad, because you actually made a couple of valid points. They would not have saved you overall, but as far as minutia goes, you were spot on.
Now, don’t you have some anonymous MRA’s comment somewhere to write a scathing indictment about?
You’re much better at that than debate.
Dalrock why did you not link to paul’s page where the debate happened rather than In Mala Fide reporting of it?
http://www.avoiceformen.com/2010/10/25/a-debate-on-domestic-violence/
[D: Fair point. Link added.]
I think David Futrelle should have a field added to his comment form:
Name:
Email:
Website:
Penis size if male and anti-feminist:
This would be required information, in order to facilitate the standard feminist debate. Naturally it would be limited to men who are critics of feminism, since feminists never screech about the wedding tackle of their tamed men.
Think how much time would be saved! This could be a real breakthrough in weblog debate efficiency. I look forward to seeing this field become standard in the feminsta-sphere.
Paul, the “single study” I mentioned was a study you made a giant deal out of “refuting.”
Indeed, you mentioned your upcoming would-be-refutation of that study in two of your previous posts in the debate.
It was the f*cking grand finale to your argument.
And you were completely and utterly wrong.
Indeed, as you know, I contacted the co-author of the study and she confirmed you were completely wrong.
This wasn’t a matter of interpretation. You grossly misinterpreted the data in a bizarre and nonsensical way to fit your argument.
And I proved that you were wrong.
Looks like failfag David Futility is at it again. Once an incoherent bitch, ALWAYS an incoherent bitch.
@David Futrelle:
“Indeed, as you know, I [David Futrelle] contacted the co-author of the study [Patricia Tjaden] and she confirmed you were completely wrong.”
According to Dr. Murray Straus (1998), Tjaden’s study may have had skewed results, vastly under estimating the true level of female perpetration, because its questions primed the respondents to consider an act of DV to only be genuine if law enforcement would have treated it as a criminal offense.
Per Dr. Martin Fiebert in his DV reference bibliography, referring to Tjaden’s study:
“[Tjaden and Thoennes] report that women, over the course of their lives were 2.9 times more likely to report being physically assaulted than men. However, it should be noted that overall reported estimate of annual intimate partner violence for women of 1.4% is significantly lower than 11-12% estimates from earlier national surveys. Straus (1998) [page 6, bottom paragraph] characterizes the data from this study as being flawed and inaccurate. He cites the wording of items as possibly creating “demand characteristics” that led subjects to view the survey as a study of crime and thus restrict their responses to exclude behavior considered harmless, especially minor assaults by women. Thus, he states this unintended demand characteristics probably account for the low prevalence rate and 3 to 1 ratio of male to female physical assaults. “
It’s not surprising that Straus and Fiebert would criticize the study, as it used a methodology similar to the CTS but got very different results.
None of that has anything to do, though, with Paul’s bizzare misrepresentation of the study’s data.
So man boobs, what is your take on the jezebel smack my bitch up post? Was I wrong in saying you were stunned when you saw the full extent of it? Do you think they are lying about all of the terrible and brutal things they describe doing? Or do you think that feminists are just more prone to domestic violence than women in general? Would any of what they describe not outrage you if the sexes were reversed?
Did you know about that post when you added them to your friend list?
@David Futrelle:
“It’s not surprising that Straus and Fiebert would criticize the study, as it used a methodology similar to the CTS but got very different results.”
You’re missing the point, David. The data from her study may have been unreliable. In scientific studies, “reliability” describes the accuracy of the data that were collected, and “validity” describes the merits of the conclusions that are drawn from the collected data. If the questions were asked in such a way that the respondents suppressed acts of violence that they did not consider serious enough to mention (such as male victims who downplayed female perpetration thinking that it wasn’t serious enough to get the female perpetrator arrested), then the study’s reliability is questionable. Yet even with this study’s compromised credibility, it nevertheless revealed that 32 percent of the self-described injury victims were males, and that’s a significant amount of male injuries. Current DV service providers report that 95 percent of their clientele are female victims, even though a significant portion of injury victims are male according to Tjaden’s study.
John: As you know, different studies of DV find radically different percentages of injury caused by men and women; we don’t know what the correct percentages are. But there is no credible study that finds women injure men more than the reverse.
Straus thinks Tjaden is asking the questions in the wrong way; she and others think he and those using an unaltered CTS survey are asking the questions in the wrong way — that’s why they deliberately altered the way in which they asked questions. If you agree with him, you say her study has less credibility; if you agree with her, it’s his studies that are less credible. For my part I think the CTS critics have a point.
Dalrock: I said quite plainly that I thought the Jezebel post was obnoxious. I was not “stunned”; I’ve never suggested that women can’t be violent. I don’t know if they’re lying or not; I think most of what was posted was probably the truth or close to it. I don’t think you can conclude from this whether feminists are more prone to violence than non-feminists; it’s not a scientific survey. If the genders were reversed I would find it equally obnoxious. I hadn’t seen the post before putting Jezebel on my friends list, but one thoroughly obnoxious post out of thousands isn’t going to get them off the list. If this were a regular thing, they’d be off.
[D: I see your point. As long as they only relish their brutal acts of domestic violence from time to time, it really isn’t a big deal. I personally found the one where they hit the guy who thought he had cancer really funny. Who wouldn’t smack a possible cancer patient around? It just goes without saying.]
Now I have a question for you: will you correct your blatant, er, misrepresentation is the nice way to put it, about what I said?
See here for more:
http://manboobz.blogspot.com/2010/11/debate-drama-dalrock-is-lying-liar.html
[D: How did you manage to find a pic of me?]
Poor choice of words in my comment to Paul above.
Let’s reword that penultimate paragraph:
This isn’t an issue that you can simply dismiss by saying “oh, she’s a feminist.” It’s a question about correctly interpreting the numbers. You grossly misinterpreted the data in a bizarre and nonsensical way to fit your argument.
And let me add this: Paul, if you want to criticize the methodology of the study, I would be happy to continue the debate, just not on your web site. (You can post there if you want, and I’ll post on mine.) But your “critique” in your final post wasn’t a critique — it was you making a giant mistake in reading the data.
@David Futrelle:
“[Patricia Tjaden] and others think [Straus] and those using an unaltered CTS survey are asking the questions in the wrong way — that’s why they deliberately altered the way in which they asked questions.”
I spoken with Murray Straus in person on two occasions and have asked him about whether he would consider modifying the CTS to measure the degree to which victims suffer pain as a result of the attacks that they endure, which in my mind would help to quantify the severity and seriousness of attacks that some might write off as harmless. Straus told me that there is no need for him to modify the CTS itself, because researchers are free to modify it. Therefore Straus has no expectation that researchers necessarily use the CTS as-is, contrary to your assumption. He encourages researchers to modify the CTS as needed in order to produce the most illuminating data. And yet he criticized the Tjaden study’s reliability, not because Tjaden modified the CTS but rather because Tjaden’s questions might tend to suppress valuable information about female perpetration.
Isn’t it past time for David Futrelle to accuse both Dalrock and John Dias of having small penes? Or is he saving that for later, when he declares victory and runs away?
@ Manboobz
Oh, Gee, you contacted the feminist author of a flawed study that I challenged and she disagreed with me.
Holy shit! What next Batman?
Continue the debate? The debate ended when you walked out whining.
One more time, Davey. You walked out of the debate, of your own choice, and said you were not coming back to it.
Perhaps your parents never taught you, but you have to live with your choices. No Mulligans in the blogosphere.
And that is even assuming there was a debate to begin with. You got publicly smoked because you are on the exact wrong side of the debate. And as evidenced by your exchange with Dias, you seem to want more. You are not even noticing that he his taking your argument to pieces right here.
Can I recommend a BDSM club instead?
If you want to debate at any point in the future, I will consider it with respect to a different subject, but on my blog only. You want attention that bad, you come earn it.
Paul, you didn’t “challenge” the study. You “got all confused and posted something that completely misrepresented its data.”
[D: And then your mom called you home before you had the chance to beat him up.]
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The debate ended when you walked out whining.
The verbal conflict never rose to the level of the debate.
This was just another Internet flamewar. Flamewar is easy and sometimes fun, but it’s not nearly as productive as an actual debate.
In an actual debate, the participants need to have common ground and something invested to give them an incentive to try.
In a flame war, the participants need no common ground and have no incentive not to try to debate (i.e. they are free to posture, to smear, to distract, to intentionally miss the point, etc.).
Learn the difference.
“The wedding tackle of our tamed men?”
Owch. Mean-spirited, aren’t we?